Maximizing Social Media Reach with Sprout Social [Review]

By Prasanna Bidkar | Small Business

Social media has unquestionably made its place in any organization big or small. Like IT some years back, all departments and personnel are now stakeholders in the social media ecosystem of an organization. With the potential to drive engagement at never-before levels, social media has become an inalienable part of a product lifecycle. It is used for innovation, design, sales and most certainly for customer support.Sprout social has many features that help you through all these stages: from targeted marketing to customer support. But this, of course, is not a one person’s job. You need a team of specialists who can handle each of these functions.

Delegation is the key

Doesn’t really matter if you are a big organization or a small business, delegation is the key to efficient utilization of available resources. With Sprout Social, you can create groups for each of the business functions, Marketing and Customer Support in the least; or if you are a social media consultant, create a new group for each client with multiple contributors.

Maximizing Social Media Reach with Sprout Social [Review]

With groups in place, you can invite your team members and assign them to specific groups. You can also specify the rights and permissions for the users.

Growing your Network

Number of connections and followers are important, but if you own a meat shop, having vegetarian followers won’t make any sense. Sprout Social’s Discovery tools help you make meaningful connections with your potential customers.

Let’s see how this feature works. Continuing with the meat shop example, let us say it is safe to assume anyone talking about an oven or grill is also interested in buying meat. With Smart Search I can look for people discussing these keywords in a given area and connect with these potential customers.

Maximizing Social Media Reach with Sprout Social [Review]

You can do a similar search for steak, ribs, crab, or any other meat that you sell and target customers in your area.

Having the ability to find people with specific keywords in their profiles and tweets can help you build a targeted and meaningful followers list.

Saving your customers’ time

Sprout social also supports Zendesk Integration. We have all experienced long waiting time on a support call or the lengthy process of creating a support ticket online. You can eliminate this additional burden for your customers by integrating you Zendesk support platform.

So the next time your support staff see a tweet saying “can’t access xyz”, they can respond in a flash by creating a support ticket for the customer.

Maintenance

There is a lot of churn on Twitter. People join, try a few tweets and many times move on if they don’t get the expected results. But social media is no magic drug for all your ailments, and needs time and the right kind of effort. Anyway, the point I want to make is that you may have many followers who are not active on Twitter anymore. The whole point of following someone is to have a conversation or learn interesting things from them.

The Cleanup feature in Sprout Social helps you find these inactive accounts and people who do not follow you back.

Feedback

No campaign, social media or otherwise, can be complete without tracking the results of the campaign. After all, you don’t want to spend big bucks on something that doesn’t work. As an administrator or a social media manager, you can connect your Bit.LY account to track the links shared by each group and review a weekly summary.

For example, this graphical display shows how I fared this last week on Twitter. For 72 tweets that I sent, I received a 35% response and appeared on 72,000 screens – any number of whom may have seen the tweet.

But this does not tell me about the links that I shared on twitter. You can dig deeper with Reports. If I pull up a detailed report for the same week, I get some more information.

Maximizing Social Media Reach with Sprout Social [Review]

This report tells me that each of the links that I shared in the past week was opened at least seven times. It also shows me the daily engagement graph if I wish to analyze and find the events that triggered better engagement.

I am using this free Trial for a week now and everything has worked well so far. A mild irritant, which may not be really an issue for you, is that the interface shortcuts tend to interfere with my activity. For example, whenever I press CTR+N to open a new browser window it opens the New Message box. I think this happens only if you use the Firefox browser.

Have you ever used Sprout Social before? Which feature do you like the most? And which do you find most useful for your business. I think it is definitely worth trying out, especially when you’re getting a 30 day free trial.